Monday, March 07, 2011

Cappo dzisiaj

How do you connect discipline, health and spirituality?Well you need discipline in order to have good health right? I can't just eat candy all day; I'm not going to be very healthy. In order to get good at anything actually you need discipline. Be it material well being or be it spirituality. You can't be just whimsical and get the same results. That's why in all systems of education there's a lot of discipline. You want to be a great acrobat, you want to be a great magician, you want to be a great photographer - you need discipline. If you want to get good at eating very well and doing detoxes or cleanses, you need a lot of discipline. Basically, the senses have to be curbed. You can't just whimsically follow your mind, your senses around. You have to understand what you want to be and work towards that. I think that's true of anything you study.What does Youth of Today stand for in 2011?Well, I don't really know. I'm not really in Youth of Today in 2011. We're just doing some reunion shows. I think it's probably made up of a bunch of guys who really like Youth of Today and playing songs for our fans. It was sort of like a seed for me of where I am today. Some of the songs I haven't sung in a while [and] when I sing them now, it reminds me of where my head was, at that time. I appreciate what I was going through and my struggles and my desire and my passions. I can definitely see how it sort of related to where I am today. I felt like I was fortunately on a good track with my life. You go back to the idea of wisdom literature. Those are the things I was blessed to be into at a young age. So that’s why Youth of Today, when I was 19 years old, it might have seemed a little precocious. Who's this 19 year old talking about control of your senses and discipline and what goes around comes around? It was because I was into books like that. I felt like if I could just read these books and write the words in a way that people could understand them, the lyrics would be timeless. I'm lucky I was into what I was into at a young age. Most people go through crazy 20s and it's only into their 30s when they realize, "man, I can't drink like this, I just gained 50 lbs in the last 10 years," or "I can't live like this anymore." At a time when I was 19- not drinking and vegetarian, at least back then, it was sort of a rare thing. Nowadays, there are a lot of kids who are Straight Edge and into cleaning living. A lot of my peers were not into that. I got lucky because a lot of people waste their entire life with that and they only get at the time they turn 30 that they're still partying like they were when they were 19 that life's becomes sort of sad and they have to somehow reorganize their value or belief system. Anyways, even if you were Straight Edge you have to always check into your value system. That's one of the sort of foibles of the Straight Edge philosophy- that it wasn't so complete, it's just a basic map. Within that map, you have to sort of refine it if you want to escape some of the other illusions that life presents.